Things We Lost in the Fire
by Apalapucian
Summary: He watches the fire some more. It warms the drafty breeze wafting in, unwelcome, from all directions. It dances gracefully, lights up the room—the ultimate antithesis of what has become of him, what little living soul he can still feel in him left, after seeing the lifeless forms of his best friends in the world.


**AN: **For Adriana (thearcherballet on Tumblr), who owns the prompt, Jily to Bastille's 'Things We Lost in the Fire'. Well, except this is more on the other Marauders. I might make a companion to it from James and Lily's perspective at some point. A bit of a warning! It's heavy. And it's Halloween, aka doomsday for Jily shippers, so keep out if you're one of us and looking for something to cheer you up.

Reviews keep the writing juju close and friendly! x

* * *

_**April 1998, The Shrieking Shack**_

He hasn't forgotten. 'Course he hasn't.

There's a box under the floorboards near the fireplace. There's a mark for it over the dust-covered wood, letters that seem to have been scratched with a blunt dagger and unrefined hands, two words that still make his heart stop and his hands twitch as if to reach for something he would realize a heartbeat later isn't there anymore.

Remus Lupin looks down upon it now; the floor, the box, the jagged ends of Sirius's handwriting. He feels like it only has been a day ago, swears it can't possibly have been that long, but then the faces swim in his mind not quite as clear as they were once upon a time. He frowns at his memory's failure to give any of them proper justice: the way Lily would turn away to hide her amused smile at something James just said, James pursing his lips to keep the instinctive smug smirk from breaking, Sirius's eye roll and suggestive comments, Peter's curious, fast-flitting glances.

Remus crouches down, hundreds of turned pages and battles won (and lost and still to be fought) later. He wipes the floor with his hands. He is hardly able to make out the words, but he needs not to read them to know what they are.

There's a box underneath, a shoebox enchanted to contain more than a normal shoebox could. He doesn't reach for it at once, afraid that opening it would be too harrowing. So he just stares at it. His eyes sting and his hands shake and his mind takes him where he wouldn't otherwise dare venture to. He doesn't need to open it, though. Not really. He doesn't know if he wants to. He doesn't even know why he's here—maybe to remind himself of what's lost? To remind himself what he's still fighting for, what's still there to achieve? It feels like skimming the pages of a favorite book, being here, holding the box in his hands. It feels like taking that volume with the tattered spine and torn corners and faded pages. The one he keeps close to him at all times, sitting there on his bedside table, keeping him company in solitary train rides, lingering on the edges of his dreams. The one he picks up time and again because he can't help it. The one he hasn't read entirely in a while because he's terrified of feeling too much, so he just leafs through it. Just hears the rustle. Just closes his eyes, lets the scent of it bring him back to how he felt when he was there—

Lily making dinner and messing up dessert and James volunteering to eat it anyway. Sirius running through an empty corridor in only his underpants, exams are over, all of it, Lily and James are laughing, and Peter is nervous about his turn to run. James and Lily's first date, Sirius insisting they should all discretely follow them in the most pathetic disguise Remus has ever seen. Peter the one buying all the sweets off the express trolley that one time, because his mum earned extra the summer before. Catching Sirius sneak in to the library to borrow an advanced volume on an exam he and James had a bet on—"Don't tell him I was here okay?" he told Remus, "don't tell _anyone_ I was here"—and Remus laughed because he's such a complete dolt. Christmas with the Potters, apple cinnamon cookies and Quidditch until sunset. The Marauders crashing Slughorn's party as the self-proclaimed 'entertainment committee' (James won a dance from Lily for making her laugh with his song number, in which his voice cracked twice and his face flushed a thousand times). Peter earning detention for accidentally making it rain in the Great Hall; "It was me, professor," all three of them readily declared at once, as Lily watched them from the sidelines, her expression unreadable—

Remus's face sours now. He drops the box, looking at it the way people have looked at him too often. He fishes out his wand, angry and wretched (and a little bit mad, but who can blame him?), and he points it at the darn thing—at James's doodle-filled exam papers and Lily's eleven year old diaries, at Sirius's outrageous Slytherin caricatures and Peter's letters from home, at his own Hogwarts acceptance letter, the wolf keychain they gave him on his fifteenth birthday ("They're made from your wandwood," they said, as if their surprise of being Animagi for him wasn't already so, so much more than enough), chocolate frog cards, faded Prophets, frayed textbooks, butterbeer caps…

His knuckles pale and a curse bubbles its way from the simmering anger to his downturned mouth—

But he can't. He just can't.

He covers his face with his hands and slumps down, defeated and worn and ready to give up (but he doesn't, because they never stopped fighting, did they, for him and for them and for what's right, so why should he?). His wand clutters to the ground and he won't, he _doesn't_, burn the box or the floorboards or the whole goddamn shack.

He won't give up, not now, even when—_especially because_—there've been too many things lost in the fire.

* * *

_**November 1981, Godric's Hollow**_

Sirius's gaze falls and gets lost on the unextinguished, flickering flames licking up one of the house's last standing walls. Beneath all the rubble, in spite of himself, he makes out the sliver of infinity James and Lily did their best to forge; the pieces of Harry's broken little broom strewn across the floor, miniature Quidditch players dangling above his cot slowly turning on their axis, James's mud-stained trainers scattered under what's left of their window, Lily's cardigan draped on the back of a chair. A soft tinkling tune plays and it grates on Sirius's ears. The Gryffindor Quidditch team banner hanging in a corner flutters, the bright, shiny scarlet fabric rippling in his peripheral vision. It makes his eyes burn.

He watches the fire some more.

It warms the drafty breeze wafting in, unwelcome, from all directions. It dances gracefully, lights up the room—the ultimate antithesis of what has become of him, what little living soul he can still feel in him left, after seeing the lifeless forms of his best friends in the world.

James and Lily like this is the object of his worst nightmares. Blank stares, cold hands, colourless lips—it's the fucking end of a line he swore, they all swore, never to tread.

Yet here they are. Here he is. What happened? What has he done?

He closes his eyes and desperately begs anyone who hears to please wake him up now, he has seen enough, felt enough, and he needs to get up, forget all this, play Quidditch with James, get scolded by Lily for burning the cookies. _Please_. Just something. Anything else.

But he can't ignore the smell of smoke and autumn in the air, can't ignore the faint cries of a baby from somewhere.

Harry.  
James.  
Lily.  
(James. _Prongs…_)  
It's all them, this place is all them, they're here, he's here, and all of this is real, except it can't be, no, because fuck it all to hell, _how can it?_

He wipes his contorting face with his grimy hands. His eyes blink rapidly, and oh how he pathetically tries not to let it loose, not again, no more, no more, but it has been, after all, only a few minutes since he broke down. It hurts so much, so fucking much—they're gone, how can they be dead?—and his insides are twisting and burning and not there at all. His heart is gone. Everything is gone. Nothing makes sense, because it can't, it just can't be bloody fucking real.

They can't be _dead_.

Peter wouldn't have done it. How could he? _How could he?_

He asks Hagrid to give him Harry. God, they might as well just have wrapped Sirius's heart in white-hot rusty chains, because the kid is so James and so Lily and so alone in the world and it breaks him every second again and again. The tearful gamekeeper babbles about some order Dumbledore gave him. Sirius doesn't catch it. He wouldn't remember this clearly later. But he _would_ remember having one solid thought, a gripping deliberation pulsing through his consciousness and keeping his footsteps falling despite everything in his being screaming that it's all pointless now, there's nothing left.

_He's going to kill him._

_He's going to find him._

His hands are tingling and his cheeks are wet as he apparates away, not looking back.

_And he's going to kill him._

* * *

_**October 1981, the Death Eaters' Headquarters**_

He's going to kill them.

Peter knows this. He hears a voice in his head that echoes as if actually spoken in the biting, hollow caverns of this place. He ignores it. His knee aches in contact with the rough floors and his back strains under the position he's in, but he ignores that, too. He keeps his head down. He wonders how much longer can he stall this. He can feel their eyes on him, but the silence tells him even _they_ must have expected the hesitation.

They are—_were_—his best friends after all.

Bellatrix Black's evident excitement is suffocating. Lucius Malfoy's cruel stare makes his skin prickle. Antonin Dolohov looks at him with narrowed eyes, his fingers stroke his wand ominously. All around him the marked, nefariously hailed organization gathers, waiting in anticipation. The Dark Lord towers over him a few feet ahead, his presence making Peter's hair stand on end and his body tremble—or is that his conscience, corroding the contours of his resolve?

But someone has to win, he thinks. This is a war, and someone has to win for it to end. And if this, what he's about to do, as detestable and vile as it may be, makes this side win, then he will do it. He will be a part of the victors, he will end the war, and no one else gets hurt anymore. (_He_ won't get hurt anymore).

It's only the logical thing to do. The Order serves him no use now, and he no use to them. He will be a significant factor (for once) of the end of a revolution, whatever the means, how ever it ends.

People die in war. They've already lost so much. Dorcas Meadowes, the Prewett twins, the McKinnons…

It's only _normal_. It happens.

But no war goes on forever.

And he will do anything to survive.

He swallows, his decision forming. Tears pool in the corners of his sunken, beady eyes, but he doesn't know why they're there. He dispels the image suddenly surfacing in the midst of his dissonant thoughts: James clapping him on the back, Lily handing him Harry.

"You hold our lives now."

He blinks away the tears.

People die in wars.

_He's going to kill them._

This one must end.

_I'm sorry_.

Peter Pettigrew raises his head and speaks at last, the dead quiet of the room making his shaky, hardly audible voice sound a hundred times louder: "Godric's Hollow, my lord."

_I'm so sorry._


End file.
